San Francisco is preparing to expunge more than 9,000 cannabis convictions dating back to 1975 \u2014 the culmination of a year-long review of court records prompted by California\u2019s 2016 legalization initiative. Misdemeanors and felonies alike are to be dismissed through a pioneering automated clearance system.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the morally right thing to do,\u201d San Francisco District Attorney George Gasc\u00f3n told the\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/a>. \u201cIf you have a felony conviction, you are automatically excluded in so many ways from participating in your community.\u201d<\/p>\n Gasc\u00f3n said his office will expunge 9,362 felony and misdemeanor cases, including the 1,230 his office has already cleared. It seems like the bureaucracy is actually being uncharacteristically proactive here, as only 23 people had come forward to demand clearance of their old pot convictions since legalization. That, by Gasc\u00f3n\u2019s own admission, was likely due to the daunting nature of the prospect.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to hire an attorney. You have to petition the court. You have to come for a hearing,\u201d\u00a0Gasc\u00f3n said in an interview with\u00a0National Public Radio<\/a>\u00a0last year. \u201cIt\u2019s a very expensive and very cumbersome process. And the reality is that the majority of the people that were punished and were the ones that suffered in this war on marijuana, war on drugs nationally, were people that can ill afford to pay an attorney.\u201d<\/p>\n After poring over records manually and identifying some 1,200 eligible cases, San Francisco officials teamed up with\u00a0Code For America<\/a>, a nonprofit that assists governments in streamlining their work with information technology. The thousands of additional cases will now be sent back to courts for processing.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s incumbent that we, as law enforcement leaders, continue to evolve how we advance fairness and public safety in our respective communities,\u201d Gasc\u00f3n told the\u00a0San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>. \u201cI hope that our success with Code for America can act as a catalyst for other leaders looking to engage in similar innovative and out-of-the-box methods to reform and rethink what our criminal justice system looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n Code for America employed its specially designed \u201cClear My Record\u201d algorithm to examine convictions and identify those eligible for expungement on the basis of what is today no longer a crime.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cContact with the criminal justice system should not be a life sentence, so we\u2019ve been working to reimagine the record-clearance process,\u201d Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America\u2019s founder and executive director, told the\u00a0Chronicle<\/a>. \u201cThis new approach, which is both innovative and common sense, changes the scale and speed of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n There is the inevitable disgruntlement from some law enforcement voices. John Lovell, legislative counsel to the\u00a0California Narcotic Officers Association<\/a>, told the LA\u00a0Times: \u201cTo simply embark on an across-the-board expungement of 9,300 [cases] without looking at any of the surrounding factors on any of those cases strikes us as cavalier irresponsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n But just as inevitably, the figures reveal a glaring racial disparity in who was getting busted for cannabis. While San Francisco is only about five percent black, a third of all cannabis-related convictions in the time period reviewed went to black people. Latinos make up about 15 percent of the city\u2019s population, but 27 percent of cannabis convictions, according to Gasc\u00f3n\u2019s office.<\/p>\n While San Francisco is the first, several California cities are preparing to start expunging cannabis convictions, as allowed by a state law passed last year<\/a>. Code for America hopes to clear a quarter million convictions across the state by the end of the year. The state law sets a goal of clearing all past cannabis-related convictions by July 2020.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Other states may soon be following, as\u00a0demands for expungement<\/a>\u00a0mount across the country. New Jersey\u2019s Gov. Phil Murphy is pledging to clear cannabis convictions as part of his legalization plan. The state judiciary says New Jersey already receives some 10,000 expungement petitions each year, from people who have done their time and want to make a fresh start. But there has been little progress in clearing this backlog. \u201cIt\u2019s like you\u2019re allowing more water in, but the cracks are still there,\u201d Sarah Lageson, a Rutgers University criminal justice professor who runs a program helping people clear their records, told\u00a0NJ Advance Media<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lawmakers in Missouri, which\u00a0passed a medical marijuana law<\/a>\u00a0last year, have\u00a0introduced a bill<\/a>\u00a0allowing expungement of prior misdemeanor cannabis offenses for medicinal users.<\/p>\n And the\u00a0Marijuana Justice Act<\/a>, now pending on Capitol Hill, requires expungement of records related to \u201cmarijuana use or possession\u201d offenses\u2014a provision that could potentially free many thousands nationwide from prisons and jails.<\/p>\n Canada has also been anticipating expungement since legalization took effect there last year, albeit very uncertainly, with the federal government\u00a0yet to move on the matter. Parliament is only now considering a bill that would bar denial of housing or employment to those with cannabis convictions \u2014 a measure\u00a0assailed by advocates<\/a>\u00a0as \u201cthe smallest of steps.\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>, do you support expunging cannabis records?<\/p>\n The post Computerized Cannabis Conviction Expungement: San Francisco Leads the Way<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
San Francisco is preparing to expunge more than 9,000 cannabis convictions dating back to 1975 \u2014 the culmination of a year-long review of court records prompted by California\u2019s 2016 legalization initiative. Misdemeanors and felonies alike are to be dismissed through a pioneering automated clearance system. \u201cIt was the morally rightContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,8883,7557,8884,8885,3092,139,3735,81,97],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33435"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33435"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33436,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33435\/revisions\/33436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Cyber-Expungement in Fog City<\/h4>\n
A Model for Other Jurisdictions\u00a0\ufeff<\/h4>\n
\n
\nRead More: Computerized Cannabis Conviction Expungement: San Francisco Leads the Way<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"